Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov
Keeping Kids Off Social Media & Betting on AI for Climate Action (feat. Sen. Brian Schatz)
Fri, 04 Apr 2025
Jessica Tarlov sits down with Senator Brian Schatz to discuss how Democrats are pushing back against Trump’s dismantling of USAID and leading the fight to protect Social Security. They also dive into his unexpected bipartisan work with Ted Cruz on the Kids Off Social Media Act and why he believes AI could be a game-changer in tackling climate change. Plus, they talk about the impact of Cory Booker’s marathon Senate speech calling out the dangers of the Trump administration. Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov. Follow Sen. Schatz, @SenBrianSchatz . Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the key issues Senator Schatz is addressing?
Yeah, it's been interesting to see the movement in every category but immigration for him, where he's still 55 to 60 percent approval, even without due process and some innocence in a labor camp being tortured. So I've kind of taken it as an L and I'm trying to move past it, at least in when I'm discussing these things. How are you finding a way to keep focusing on what matters?
And can you talk a bit about the reconciliation bill? So your running point for the Democrats there?
Sure. They have to go through a multi-step process, which is super boring. But the point is they are going to, at least currently, their plan is to literally double the deficit. to do something called current policy baseline. You don't need to know why they call it that, but essentially to say that whatever the current policy is in the 11th year and beyond doesn't cost a penny.
So from an accounting standpoint, like that sounds awesome. My mortgage is only a liability on my books for the next nine and a half years. And then after that, it's pretty much free. Well, that's not actually true. But if my accountant told me I could do that, I might make some very, very bad decisions for the national fiscal situation.
So that's what they're going to do is they're going to increase the debt, not the deficit by about double. They're going to cut taxes for trillionaires and they still need to find more More savings in order to enact all of that stuff. And they're looking very, very hard at Medicaid cuts.
And so this is an opportunity for Democrats to be clear from, you know, John Fetterman to Bernie Sanders and everyone in between. We all agree. that cutting Medicaid and using that savings to kind of shovel it to the wealthiest billionaire corporations that have ever existed on the planet is a very bad idea politically and policy-wise. So we're going to fight like hell this week.
The problem is this is like step two in a three-step process. So the Republicans are going to claim, hey, this is just a framework, the cuts are not in there, blah, blah, blah. And what we have to do is say, yeah, yeah, yeah, That's all bullshit. We all know where this is landing.
You want the tariff revenue, which is another way of saying money regular people pay when they go to the grocery store or the Home Depot or the Best Buy or to the car dealership. Extra money that they pay gets counted as revenue, and that revenue is going to be the reason that they claim that their tax cuts for the wealthy are so-called deficit neutral.
And I think it's a really important point to make because it's one of those things where Democrats are – everyone is prone to rhetorical excess. And so you would forgive a regular listener for thinking, well, that's probably not exactly what they're doing. They're not actually going to take the money that I pay –
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Chapter 2: How does the Kids Off Social Media Act work?
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Donald Trump's been back in office long enough to shock or surprise just about anyone who voted for him at this point, be it the Signal scandal or the tariff turnarounds, the Jeanine Pirro of it all, the way he talks about Ozempic. And he takes the fat, the fat shot drug.
So rude. I'm in London and I just paid for this damn fat drug I take. I said, it's not working.
On Today Explained, we're asking if any of his voters are experiencing voters remorse, especially those ones who are newer to his winning coalition. Younger voters, black voters, Latin voters. We're heading to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to ask them if regrets. Do they have a few? And just by way of spoiler to get this out of the way, the answer is yes, they do.
And he takes the fat, the fat shot drug.
Do you think that political will involves being open to some kind of means testing at some point? I know that there are Democrats who have said, fine by me, right? Like if we get to the point where there are seniors who definitely don't need it, that we can push them out of the program so that people like your father-in-law can make sure that they are able to get their payments.
I think a better way to do this is to just make sure that every dollar of income is taxed for Social Security purposes, right? There's currently a cap above which you pay no Social Security tax. So if you're doing well but not that well, you know, if you make $80,000 or something and you're a firefighter or a teacher, all of that money is taxed for Social Security purposes. If you make $800,000...
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Chapter 3: What is Cory Booker's Senate speech about?
Chapter 4: How is AI being used for climate solutions?
Sure, but I think the similarity to me is at the kind of presidential level, it was the moment at which people decided, fairly or unfairly, that maybe Joe Biden wasn't on the ball, right? And again, I don't want to relitigate the last election, but it was a moment where people said, like, shouldn't we have a more engaged commander in chief?
And I think this is the moment where people are saying, hey, all this chaos that he was sort of nodding towards, tweeting about, yammering about, you know, on television or at one of his rallies, like it is actually starting to happen. And as you know, there are probably, I don't know, 10 to 15% of the voters who, who voted for Donald Trump saying, he's just going to say stuff, but it's worth it.
And I think what's different about this term than the first Trump term is he's going through with it. He's going to do the tariffs. He has illegally... you know, laid off people from the National Park Service and the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Education. He is having his agents arrest people without due process. He is aligning with Putin and North Korea.
That's actually happening. This is no longer some theoretical thing where someone on Fox or some center-left pundit can tell me, oh, you always say that, and he always pivots back to the center. This dude is going through with all the crazy things, and I think Signalgate is an indicator that, oh, God, they weren't kidding. Like, they don't believe that they are responsible for following the law.
Is that why you voted for the continuing resolution?
The reason I voted for the continuing resolution is pretty straightforward. I read the Anti-Deficiency Act. The Anti-Deficiency Act only kicks in when there's a lapse in appropriations. When there's a lapse in appropriations, then the executive branch basically has total control over what parts of the government are able to open and not open. And the only criteria is life-saving.
And Russ Vogt had a series of plans to essentially riff, reductions in force, lay off the entire federal workforce minus whomever he decided was lifesaving, which presumably would have been like ICE. Nobody. Well, ICE border protection, you know, his sort of the law enforcement arm of the Office of Management and Budget. And so for me, it was not like a tough call in terms of the policy of it.
But I also think that You know, we we Democrats did a very bad job of communicating amongst ourselves. Right. Between the House and the Senate, we were not on the same page. And then maybe more importantly, one of the things that gives me the most hope is this pluralistic people power movement out there for America.
And it's a little different than Resistance 1.0 in the sense that it doesn't have quite the progressive, I'm an unreconstructed progressive, but I think the thing that's happening now is like veterans and federal workers and retirees and just regular folks are like, I guess I'm a Democrat or I've never been a Democrat or whatever. But it's not this kind of like left-leaning movement.
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